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How Do I Get Started with AWS?
There’s some basic information you need to know before you get started with AWS:
How to Sign Up
Before you begin using AWS, you need to create an account. When you sign up for AWS, AWS signs your account up for all services. You are charged only for the services you use.
To sign up for AWS
Go to http://aws.amazon.com and click Sign Up Now.
Follow the on-screen instructions.
How to Use the AWS Free Usage Tier
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) free usage tier offers you an opportunity to test drive several key AWS products for free, up to a certain level of usage. By following the guidelines of the offer, you can gain experience working in the cloud at no charge for an entire year. When your free usage expires, or if your application use exceeds the provisions of the free usage tier, you simply pay the standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.
Here are some of the things you can do with services when you try out the AWS free usage tier:
For information about getting started in the AWS free usage tier, go to Getting Started Guide: AWS Free Usage Tier.
How to Manage Your Account
At any time, you can access and manage your account information at http://aws.amazon.com/account. From the My Account page you can view current charges and account activity and download usage reports. For an example of how to track your account activity, go to View Your Account Activity in the Getting Started Guide: AWS Free Usage Tier. This document shows an example bill for deploying a sample web application on AWS.
You can also monitor your estimated charges using Amazon CloudWatch. You can choose to receive alerts by email when charges have exceeded a certain threshold. For more information, go to Monitor Your Estimated Charges Using Amazon CloudWatch.
How to Access AWS
There are several ways to access Amazon Web Services:
AWS Marketplace. An online store that makes it easy for you to find, compare, and immediately start using software for building your products and running your business.
AWS Management Console. Provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your compute, storage, and other cloud resources. Most AWS products can be used from inside the console, and the console supports the majority of functionality for each service.
AWS command line interface. For more information about accessing the command line interface for each service, go to AWS Command Line Tools in the Amazon Web Services Glossary.
AWS SDKs. AWS offers SDKs for Java, .NET, PHP, Android, iOS, and Ruby. The Sample Code & Libraries Catalog also provides a listing of code, SDKs, sample applications, and other tools available for use.
Toolkits for developers. If you’re a Java or a .NET developer, try out our AWS Toolkit for Eclipse or AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. These toolkits include the programming libraries, and you can use them to quickly deploy your applications to AWS. If you’re a PHP developer, you can quickly and easily update your applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using AWS DevTools, a Git client extension; for more information, go to AWS DevTools in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.
AWS web service APIs. Developers can consult the API reference documentation for the product they want to use. All product documentation can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/. If you wanted to use the web service APIs for Amazon EC2, for instance, you can find that information at http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/ec2/.
How to Manage Your Resources
When you sign up with AWS, we create an AWS account for you to use to manage and pay for all your AWS resources. Your AWS account also has its own set of security credentials that you use to interact with AWS. If you give someone the credentials to your AWS account, you are allowing them to do anything with your account and its AWS resources.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a way to create sub-accounts of your main AWS account. You can control which AWS services IAM users can access and the actions they can perform. You can give IAM users their own credentials so that you don't need to give them access to your account's root credentials.
For more information about IAM, go to What Can I Do with IAM?
